Painted Woods Oil Field Has Been Updated

Painted Woods oil field has been updated.

This field is located just a few miles to the northwest of Williston, a few minutes drive.

Some observations. All personal opinion and I'm sure many folks will disagree me. The observations come in context of the USGS 2013 Survey.

1. Almost all the wells are middle Bakken wells to date in this field.

2. All the wells have paid for themselves at the well head except for the most recently completed wells. These wells will now go on producing for the next 20 or 30 years. It costs very little to maintain a producing well compared to the initial cost. There will be no dry wells in this field (except due to operator error). Operators should be able to drill out this field on operating cash flow of the existing wells already in the field.

3. I would consider the Painted Woods a very good Bakken oil field, but probably "average" in the big scheme of things.

4. Being on the periphery of the Bakken in North Dakota, my expectation is that the Three Forks is going to be an even big play. The middle Bakken is about 60 feet thick. The Three Forks is about 300 feet thick, for round numbers. Both the middle Bakken and the Three Forks are sourced from the same source rock.

5. A quick glance of the NDIC GIS map server suggests that the field is now about twice as big as it was when BEXP drilled the first Painted Woods well. It looks like there about 80 sections.

6. All spacing units in the Painted Woods field are 1280-acre spacing units; there are no 640-acre units; and there are no 2560-acre overlapping spacing units yet.

7. There is only one active rig in the oil field (at this time): a Statoil rig. But there are a lot of permits for wells waiting to be drilled.

8. With the exception of five full sections, and two small sections along the Montana state line, the entire field is held by production. Two of those five sections appear to have confidential wells in place.

9. A quick glance suggests there is an average of one long horizontal in each spacing unit. It's hard to believe that this field won't have at least 4 wells in each 1280-acre spacing unit when all is said and done (160 wells, minimum). And my hunch is there will be a lot more. There will definitely be wells down the section lines with overlapping 2560-acre units before it's all done. [Based on effectiveness of fracking there should be a minimum of four middle Bakken wells on each spacing unit: 160 wells. A minimum of three wells in both TF1 and TF2 gives another 240 wells. That's 400 wells, and even that number could be low, but we won't know for ten years or more.]

10. There are almost no multi-well pads; any multi-well pads are 2-well pads, but new permits will change that.